Army Corps Knew Trump's 'Open The Tap' Order Would Waste Water, Do F*ck-All For LA Fires
Only wasted water that farmers will need. It's not like an order to shoot civilians.
Hey, remember how crazy things were during Donald Trump’s first term, when some dumb inexplicable shit would happen and then weeks or months later journalists were still finding out more about what actually happened, often with the help of documents and/or insiders who eventually spilled the proverbial beans?
Like that fiasco where we only knew that Trump held a friendly meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister because Russian media reported it? And months later, we also learned US intelligence was so freaked out that it rushed to extract a super high-value US intelligence asset from the goddamn Kremlin before Trump could rat that spy out?
We are happy to say that (probably) nobody’s life will be endangered by two stories that both broke Friday about that infuriating incident in January when Mad King Donald ordered pointless (except to punish California of course) releases of huge amounts of water from two dams in Central California, wasting 2.2 billion gallons of water that should have been held in reserve for farmers to use this summer. During the drought.
As you may recall, Trump took credit for the miracle of spilling two billion gallons of water that never got anywhere near the deadly fires in Los Angeles, and idiots on Twitter congratulated him for his bold action.
Now, thanks to separate stories from CNN (archive link) and the Washington Post (another archive link), we know the rest of the story, and it’s exactly as stupid and outrageous as you expected, and then some.
Trump has long believed, with the stubborn certainty of a true crank, that drought and wildfires in California have nothing to do with climate change, but are actually the result of crazy hippie water policy that places the welfare of tiny endangered fish over all else. It’s pure bullshit that’s been around since the late Oughts despite repeated debunkings. Trump dragged it out again during the LA fires, even though Southern California doesn’t even get its water from the Bay area, where the evil endangered fishies supposedly bogart all the state’s water. (They don’t.)
Trump also pushed a bizarre claim that there’s some magical spigot or valve tap that, if opened, would fill California’s rivers and lakes and end drought and wildfires for all time. Like El Dorado, the lost city of gold, its location varied: maybe in northern California, or the Pacific Northwest, or possibly Canada.
For all we know, Trump wants to invade Canada to take control of that magic water pump, and won’t he be astonished after the war when the Navy SEALS seize some dam in British Columbia and all they find among heaped-up corpses of Mounties is a sign reading PEACE ON EARTH.
Once he became president again, Trump could order people around and make them do things, so it made sense to him that a huge release of water in one part of California would prove just how right he was about everything.
Not only did nobody try to talk him out of it, his dream of making the deserts moist was enabled by some enthusiastic dipshits from Elon Musk’s DOGE corral, as we learn for the first time from CNN’s account of the farcical aquatic fuck-tussle.
Not The Sharpest Water Knives In The Drawer
The chucklefucks first pestered Bureau of Reclamation officials by phone, then flew out to California with a halfassed plan to enter federal water facilities and record themselves operating the pumps on Trump’s orders. They may have thought they could simply turn a giant red valve or push a button on a control panel. Happens in movies all the time.
Spoiler: The DOPES completely failed, but they did take a triumphant selfie in front of a 3-D map of an irrigation district.
The DOGEdorks, including a “former oil company CEO” named Tyler Hassen, who looks like a younger, smarmier Tucker Carlson, tried to convince Reclamation officials that the president of the United States had ordered them to
turn on water pumps at the Jones Pumping Plant. […] The plant transfers water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into a canal system, delivering water to farmers and other water users in the Central Valley.
But DOGE’s representatives were repeatedly rebuffed by officials; the Jones pumps were temporarily offline and couldn’t pump water at the facility because of a planned PG&E power outage for line maintenance.
Then Hassen and a second inartful DOGEr named Bryton Shang headed out to California the last week of January, where they were politely treated to a tour of the Jones Pumping Plant and briefed on how the Bureau does water stuff. Nobody at DOGE or the White House would tell CNN how the flights were paid for.
But the men’s request to have a photo taken of them turning on the Jones pumps didn’t happen; Shang wasn’t an official government employee, he wasn’t allowed inside the pump facility’s control room, which is under strict cybersecurity protocols. Hassen had to travel back before the electricity was scheduled to be restored.
The Keystone Flops posted their selfie and a couple other pics to DOGE’s Twitter account (archive link), implying they had pushed the lazy bureaucrats to get the pumps back in operation, which is what happens when scheduled maintenance is completed. Flawless victory!
The canal does not send water to Southern California. But it does head southish “toward” the general direction of SoCal, delivering irrigation water along its route until it terminates near Fresno, a mere 220 miles and some San Gabriel Mountains away from the lights of LA County.
“They didn’t get their photo op,” a person with knowledge of the matter told CNN. The entire episode felt like “what DOGE has been this entire time — this slapstick operation of 20-somethings they’re seeing as whiz kids but have zero knowledge.”
Trump Literally Floods The Zone
A few days after the failure of Mission: Hysterical, Trump himself intervened, ordering the Army Corps to dump water from Terminus Dam on Lake Kaweah and from Schafer Dam on Lake Success. As this helpful map from The Dispatch makes clear, neither drains toward LA, but instead toward the dry bed of Tulare Lake, which generally only has water in it during floods.
As the Washington Post reported Friday (archive link), the commander of the Army Corps’ Sacramento District, Col. Chad W. Caldwell, knew perfectly well that the water wouldn’t get to Los Angeles, but he and other federal water bosses followed the orders because after all, it was the president of the USA and he’d issued an executive order about it, even if it was a stupid one.
Through a public records request, the Post obtained a copy of the CYA memo Caldwell wrote about the sorry fiasco four days later. In it, he wrote that the water releases
“could not be delivered to Southern California directly.” To do so would have required several steps of coordination with state and federal agencies to transport the water to a rarely used connection point, and it quickly became clear that was impossible in such little time, according to the memo.
While it’s not quite as entertaining as the CNN account of the Dodgy DOGE Doodoohead Dudes, the Post story does detail the many, many ways the January 30 water dump blew past normal procedures for managing scarce water resources, just to please King Fuckface and keep him from having a tantrum.
Under normal circumstances, [water] releases are carefully communicated in advance to downstream water managers, farmers and residents, said Calvin Foster, a former Army Corps official who retired in November from his post overseeing several dams, including the ones at Success Lake and Lake Kaweah. And releases typically ramp up gradually, he said. A sudden surge of water from upstream can be dangerous to anyone downstream, including people fishing or kayaking or homeless people who set up camp along riverbanks, Foster said.
But the Army Corps didn’t even mention Trump’s order at that day’s morning meeting of agency representatives. Instead, state and local water authorities were only notified hours after the meeting when the Army Corps told them the dams would be releasing the water, so get ready, here it comes. One Tulare County official notified colleague Denise England by email, late in the afternoon, that the Army Corps planned a “maximum release of water beginning tonight.”
England was told to expect water flowing out at 5,000 cubic feet per second — a rate she described as turning “the gates wide open.”
“The volume of water didn’t make sense,” she said. “The way it came down didn’t make sense. Because usually we would have had meetings with our local water agencies to get the channels ready.”
Go read the whole infuriating thing, because it’s a reminder — and preview — of how Trump’s governing by impulse will keep playing out again and again as long as he can get away with it.
In this case, California dodged a disaster, mostly by dumb luck, since state and local officials convinced the Army Corps not to release the more than five billion gallons that Trump wanted, so there was no serious flooding, and a good portion of the water that was released percolated through the earth to recharge groundwater, thanks to the design of California’s water management system.
But it’s pretty difficult to Trump-proof an entire government, and at some point, in some more serious situation, we may not be saved by another combination of chance, resilient systems, sane government actors, or even by the fact that Trump seems to attract henchmen who’d be fired for incompetence by the average cartoon villain.
[CNN (archive link) / WaPo (archive link) / NRDC / Dispatch]
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I really feel like about 50% of the maladministration idiocy can be chalked up to the Mad King looking at maps and thinking if he gets the Sharpie out, he’ll magic a new reality into being.
It's almost as if America was ultimately fucked because there are both too many cowards and people willing to go along with the insurrectionist orange rapist.